Trucking
Transport Dive David TaubeMarch 17, 2023
• Business for Werner Enterprises has increasingly shifted toward transporting retail and consumer products as the carrier has sought out growing companies providing consumer essentials.
• Retail and consumer goods made up 49% of its top 50 customers over five years ago, but that has since grown, with those industry groups making up 60% of the mix as of 2022.
• That comes as Werner has anticipated how to best perform during downcycles. “Over the last several years, we carefully designed and prepared our business to outperform in a slowing economy,” CEO, Chairman and President Derek Leathers noted last month on a
Q4 earnings call.
Industry
The Journal of Commerce Bill Mongelluzzo March 17, 2023
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US imports from Asia plunged 31.1 percent year over year in February to 1.09 million TEU, the lowest level since March 2020 at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
February marked the sixth consecutive month of year-over-year declines in Asian imports that began in September. Still, those declines are being compared with the record or near-record import volumes that were posted in late 2021 and early 2022.
Retailers are forecasting that monthly import volumes will continue to register year-over-year declines at least through July as they reduce their inventory overhang ahead of the peak shipping season that begins in August, although the declines are expected
to gradually taper off in the coming months.
Freight Waves Greg Miller March 17, 2023
Los Angeles had expected its numbers to be ugly in February — and they were.
“The decline was indeed steep,” acknowledged Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka during a press conference Friday.
Total throughput fell to only 487,846 twenty-foot equivalent units in February, plunging 43% year on year. Last month’s throughput was down 33% from January and 31% from February 2019, pre-COVID.
Los Angeles looks like it fell back to third place among U.S. container ports for the month of February. The Port of New York/New Jersey topped Los Angeles during several months in 2022; it has yet to report February numbers but appears likely to report higher
throughput than Los Angeles.
On Tuesday, Long Beach reported February throughput of 543,675 TEUs, coming in 11% above Los Angeles.
Transport Topics Seth Clevenger March 17, 2023
One of the companies taking a unique approach to autonomous trucking is Gatik. Instead of targeting the longhaul segment, this company is working directly with large shippers to automate shorthaul routes with autonomous box trucks that shuttle goods between
fulfillment centers, warehouses and drop-off locations.
This “hyper constrained model” — with fixed, repeatable routes — reduces the technical challenge of autonomy, said Richard Steiner, Gatik’s head of policy and communications.
The Wall Street Journal Costas Paris And Joe Wallace March 17, 2023
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China is on an oil-supertanker hiring spree, a sign energy demand has sped up after the world’s second-largest economy limped out of its Covid-19 lockdowns.
Traders carry crude to China, the world’s biggest oil importer, in Eiffel Tower-size tankers called Very Large Crude Carriers that each lug two million barrels of oil. The cost of chartering the most coveted type of these tankers, featuring modern exhaust systems,
has shot up to nearly $100,000 a day, ship brokers say. That is double the rate from a month ago.
Behind the rise is a spurt of crude demand in China’s oil-refining industry, where U.S. oil is in particularly high demand right now.
Logistics Management March 17, 2023
Rail carloads—at 229,246—fell 1.5% annually, trailing the week ending March 4, at 237,413, and topping the week ending February 25, at 226,435.
Intermodal containers and trailers—at 229,383—fell 13.0% compared to the same week a year ago, trailing the weeks ending March 4 and February 25, at 236,778 and 232,798, respectively.
Government/Safety/Sustainability
Transport Topics Katie Pyzyk March 17, 2023
To remain competitive in a persistently challenging labor market, trucking companies and fleet operators are exploring performance-based pay models to help boost driver retention and recruiting.
“Things are really pushing toward modifying the pay model to be more encompassing of the realities that the driver faces,” said Darrin Demchuk, vice president of fleet solutions at technology vendor Platform Science.
Heavy Duty Trucking Deborah Lockridge March 17, 2023
“The existing CSA program is about predicting crash risk,” Bryan said. “None of us believe that ever worked. It does a terrible job.”
Instead, he said the IRT model meant, “We’re moving away from pretending we can predict future crashes and toward evaluating safety culture.” The new IRT method, he explained, would move beyond the seven BASICs and create a single safety culture score.
OK, that seems like a good idea. But how do you measure safety culture?
A Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study found that fleets that reported building a strong safety culture, with management and driver buy-in, increased safety outcomes. But the actual strategies varied widely.
As VTTI’s Matt Camden explained in a 2019 guest article, “safety culture has been a popular topic in the safety literature since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986; however, the exact definition of safety culture has been widely debated.
Workforce
MIT Sloan Management Review March 14, 2023
The airline is upskilling its front-line workers by offering them data and analytics training and then hiring them for hard-to-fill roles.
Michelle McCrackin, senior manager of analytics learning and development at Delta Air Lines, never imagined that she’d be an analytics leader when she first joined the airline as an HR business partner. But, faced with the challenge of hiring outside analytics
talent, she proposed a solution that would change her career path along with the paths of other Delta employees: an internal analytics training program. Delta Analytics Academy (DAA) enables front-line employees to gain in-demand tech skills and the opportunity
to advance within the organization. In December 2022, DAA graduated its first cohort of 12 students, selected from a pool of 750 applicants that included gate agents, baggage handlers, flight attendants, and other operational experts interested in learning
how data and analytics can be applied to process-improvement challenges.
Freight Waves Noi Mahoney March 19, 2023
Wages and total employees in Mexico’s cargo trucking industry increased slightly between the final quarter of 2022 and the same period a year earlier.
The trucking industry employed 1.18 million people during the fourth quarter of 2022, a 4.4% increase compared to the same year-ago period, according to recent figures from Data Mexico and the Ministry of Economy.
The average monthly salary for cargo truck drivers across the country increased more than 9% to 7,004 pesos ($370.71 or about $4,448.52 annually).
Mexican truckers’ earnings varied widely by location, the type of cargo truck or van driven, the size of the company and the sector they were employed in.
On the low end of wages were drivers of cargo cars, vans and “rabons” or short-bed trucks, while longhaul dry van and double tractor-trailer drivers can earn up to 45,000 pesos a month ($2,379.15).
The Wall Street Journal Harriet Torry March 18, 2023
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An estimated 380,000 Americans in their prime working years, aged 25 to 54, held jobs before the pandemic but no longer did late last year, according to estimates from Bank of America. Bank economists said the lack of affordable and quality child care is a
significant factor.
Bank-account data shows 7% fewer customers were making child-care payments at the end of last year compared with the beginning of 2020. The decline comes despite a roughly 2% increase in the number of jobs in the U.S. since February 2020, Labor Department data
shows.
Economy
Freight Waves Adam Josephson March 17, 2023
A FreightWaves analysis of the monthly Personal Income and Outlays report from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) indicates that extraordinary federal government programs boosted personal income by an estimated $2.3 trillion from March 2020 to December
2022. The BEA identifies these as “federal pandemic response programs.”
It’s worth examining the timing of the support. Of the $2.3 trillion of explicitly listed support, 31% came through April to July 2020 and another 33% came through January to April 2021. In other words, nearly two-thirds covered just an eight-month span — mainly
from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) in March/April 2020 and the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
Expectedly, that led to a historic uptick in freight volumes and rates.
When we assess trucking volumes over the last three years, we find volumes surged in the immediate aftermath of CARES and PPP in early 2020. They remained unusually elevated throughout most of 2021, aided by subsequent stimulus programs, but have fallen ever
since as the effects of the stimulus programs have worn off. The same trend is evident in truckload spot rates, which have dropped back to where they were in June 2020.
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